See.Sense Icon 2 Review

See.Sense’s Icon 2 is a super bright bike light that promises reactive safety features like brake lights, roundabout awareness, and even road surface reporting. It’s all about enhancing your safety in an intelligent but convenient way.

Keeping you Alive

Keeping you alive is the top-level goal of all bike lights. Well, actually staying alive is pretty much the top-level goal of everything… but bike lights specifically are designed for ensuring you’re visible to third-parties in cars rather than illuminating the path ahead.

Bike light manufacturers haven’t necessarily lost sight of this goal, but it does seem like they’ve fixated on one part of the strategy for achieving it rather than considering how their technology might enable road danger reduction in new ways.

Enter See.Sense. Improving cyclist safety is their mission statement, and while their lights do the same thing as their rivals in some ways—that is to say that the Icon2 is very bright—they’re making lights that do much more than just being small, light, and very bright.

The Icon2 is what See.Sense describes as Reactive. That’s an umbrella term for a whole bunch of smart features that react to your cycling environment to keep you safer. They’ll flash brighter and faster at junctions and roundabouts. They’ll work as a brake light. And they even do smart stuff like act as a bike theft monitor and report road surface conditions to See.Sense’s central database. (Plus, in less exciting but very useful news, they also react to movement, turning on when you move and off when you’ve been stopped for three minutes.)

What the Icon2 offers is a quality bike light that also packs in some truly innovative tricks designed for improving your safety. And you’ll never actually have to think about them. With that in mind, it’s perhaps better to think of the Icon2 as a light that does what all bike lights should be doing in 2020, rather than as the leader in the smaller category of smart lights that could otherwise feel complex or unnecessary.

Bright and Visible

We’ll return to the genius stuff in more detail, but first let’s take a quick look at the Icon 2’s performance as a light.

The headline is that it’s very, very bright despite its small package. The rear light, tested, has 300 lumens and the front has 400. In terms of raw numbers, that maybe sounds a little modest in an industry that often boasts into the thousands in its larger units, but the Icon 2 does a lot with what it’s got.

That’s because the Icon 2 combines an LED matrix with a CREE LED. Without going down a technical rabbit hole, that means a rich, diffuse light coverage punctuated by an extremely focused, bright light that’ll make it difficult for drivers approaching from the rear to miss you. That’s also the reason why it can be visible from 3km away while also providing a 270-degree viewing angle for side visibility.

(And if you want to get really deep into See.Sense lore, the CREE & matrix pairing is a combination of the technologies in the company’s original Icon [CREE] and Ace [Matrix] lights.)

This also allows for irregular flashing patterns with varying degrees of focus and brightness, making you much more visible to cars. The Icon 2 has several flashing pattern options as well as a steady “on” setting.

Convenience Comes First

It’s a testament to See.Sense’s hard work that the Icon2 is only as complex as you want it to be. That is to say, you could attach it to the back of your bike, hit the power button, and ride like any other light while benefiting from its smart features. You’d have a fine experience doing so—it’s a bright, effective light designed for safety.

I really do mean that. There’s a tendency in cycling tech to throw the bathroom sink at features, making products ever more complex and turning both the initial setup and pre-ride experience into chores. The Icon2 gives you a great experience straight out the box: just charge and ride.

Getting Smart

The Icon 2 runs on “passive AI” to do its most important stuff. That’s why, although you’ll want to make sure you pair it with the app for extra features and options, you don’t ever really need to think too hard about what it’s doing. There’s a lot of smart stuff going on under the hood to keep you safe on the road, and it’s all a result of the Icon 2’s AI reacting to your environment.

This means that it knows when you’re filtering in traffic, approaching road junctions and roundabouts, or have car headlights oncoming. The Icon 2 will flash brighter and faster in those situations, to ensure you’re more visbile to drivers.

There are other tricks built-in too, like a cool feature that detects you slowing down and lets the Icon 2 act as a brake light. Drivers might not expect to see it, but there’s clear safety value in becoming more visible during sudden decreases in speed. Then there’s crash detection (more on that later, sadly) and theft detection.

There’s probably more that’s slipping my mind. It does a lot, and it does it well. All the features are useful without any pointless filler.

The only feature that’s a bit pie-in-the-sky is the road surface tracking. It’s a feature that does fit within the company’s goals as a safety pioneer, but after decades of tireless road danger reduction campaigning, it’s hard to imagine a bike light manufacturer having the clout to turn that data into anything actionable by local councils. (Or, to be more precise, to have any of their findings acted upon by local councils.)

Finally, the Icon 2 supports the ANT+ light protocol. That’s, unfortunately, not a part of ANT+ that’s widely supported by head unit manufacturers at the moment. But if you’ve got a moderately recent Garmin Edge model, and statistically you do, then you’ll probably be good.

Is See.Sense Ready for the Big Time?

Since launching in 2013, See.Sense has gone from strength to strength. They’re making products cyclists want, and they’re listening to their customers as they revise and develop new products. Much of the funding for each new device has come through KickStarters—a source that clearly demonstrates customer desire. The flip side of KickStarters is that they often come with unrealistic goals, unmanageable timelines, and produce products that fail to meet scope. Is that true of See.Sense and their Icon 2?

Well, no. That’s the short answer. If you’ve read this far then it should already be clear that the Icon 2 is very good. They’ve had a while to get this right, but by all accounts they haven’t really missed a beat on their journey so far.

The app does betray a few hints that See.Sense is not yet fully matured. For example, there’s a typo on the above screen (“check that you phone has signal”), which is one of the earliest setup screens you’ll encounter. And the app in general has that big font, white background look of something developed for an older generation of smartphones with lower resolutions.

I should clarify that this is not a big issue. In fact, it’s true of my favorite cycling technologies. The Everysight app seems to permanently be about 80% complete with every new update, regardless of how much they add to it. In the cycling technology space, there’s currently a sense that if it’s finished then you’ve released it too late. I don’t necessarily have the impression that See.Sense subscribes to this philosophy, I just bring it up to highlight that, given their peers, it’s not too important if their app maybe needs one more layer of aesthetic polish.

Which brings us to:

The Downsides

While it was generally a great experience, I did encounter one major problem with the Icon 2: it sent false crash alerts to my wife while I was out riding.

It sent three notifications in total on a short 20-mile ride. I thought that it had coincided with me jumping off the bike to take photos, but on inspection, the locations in the text messages don’t correlate with much—just regular riding. Safety features are only useful if they work reliably, and crash detection is no good if it throws up false positives.

Is it a big deal? Probably not, since you likely already own a device that does crash detection anyway. I noticed some other stuff though—things like false reporting of my bike being tampered with and 100 miles randomly being added to my stats on a day that I didn’t even ride—that, when combined, made me think the Icon 2 maybe isn’t as smart as it seems.

My wife was clearly feeling down on it too. She told me “If you go out on bike tomorrow, don’t take the light that tells me you’ve died.”

Then there are some nitpicking things that don’t really matter:

• It was a little difficult to tell whether the device was fully off or just in standby at first
• The app doesn’t tell you the intended purpose of each flash mode
• It also doesn’t explain what brake mode is (as an optional toggle that defaults to Off mode, it’d be nice to have some indication of what I’m turning on)
• The battery needs a first-time charge that takes 10 hours (it’s strange in 2020 to get an electronic device that doesn’t come at least half-charged, and it led to me taking longer to explore the Icon 2’s features than I would’ve)
• It uses Micro-USB rather than USB-C
• Theft alert is more likely to throw up false positives and notifications about fellow cyclists nudging your bike at a cafe than ever catch a thief in the act

The Icon 2 vs. its Rivals

It’s fair to say that See.Sense already leads the pack in terms of smart light features. And in that sense, the real comparison isn’t so much with the Icon 2’s direct competitors—because the Icon 2 so effortlessly outdoes them—but with products that run parallel. Products like Cycliq’s bike light camera and Garmin’s Varia Rearview Radar.

These are all lights doing something so different that a direct comparison between them seems silly. But it’s unlikely that anybody would buy more than one of them, so in some way these three different products with three different attempts at building out innovative, cutting-edge safety features on a bike light do end up being competitors.

In terms of what its reactive features add to the light itself, the Icon 2 is the clear winner. It’s just the best bike light of the three, with all its smarts only adding to its value as a light. And with Cycliq and Garmin offering 100 lumens and 20-65 lumens respectively, the Icon 2 beats them out brightness pretty effortlessly. Some additional features might complicate matters though: Cycliq’s camera and the Varia’s radar offer two different perspectives on ride safety.

In my experience, cameras like the Cycliq, unfortunately, work better for content creation than for punishing dangerous drivers in a world where reckless driving goes unpunished and cyclists’ lives are considered expendable. The Varia is a closer call: it requires additional equipment, but it’s increasingly supported by head units that you already own. I have to admit that I’ve never fully known what a rider is supposed to do with the Varia’s data short of diving off the road when your head unit flashes red. But many riders swear by it.

With all three products being so different, it’s ultimately a decision that’ll come down to user preference. The Icon 2 is probably the least fun of the three as a new toy, but it’s certainly the best choice as a bike light.

What you get

• See.Sense Icon 2 rear light (duh)
• Mounting system for aero or regular seatposts
  • This system supports vertical or horizontal mounting, and the Icon 2 itself supports four different mounting positions, allowing for a lot of options
• USB cable
• Quickstart guide

Specifications

• Lumens (Rear): 300
• Runtime: 16hrs on ‘Reactive Flash’
• Intelligent battery: Automatic brightness adjust to conserve battery
• Weight: 50 grams (including mount)
• Dust & Water Resistance: IP67 Rated
• Wireless: Bluetooth, ANT+
• Software Updates: OTA via app

Conclusion

The Icon 2 gets the basics right: it’s a very bright, very reliable bike light. It would’ve been easy for See.Sense to let the smart features carry an otherwise mediocre light, but instead they’ve created a light that would be super powerful and reasonably priced even without the smart features.

Its reactive features are the main draw though, and they work very well without being intrusive. I firmly believe that smart cycling technologies won’t hit the mainstream unless they make the riding experience more convenient, and thankfully See.Sense hits that goal easily.

I do have some concerns about the issues I encountered, both in terms of the viability of its safety features and its smarts in general, but the Icon 2 is as good as it gets on bike lights at the moment. It’s an instant leader, and I’m excited to see what See.Sense comes up with next.